What Is Hypnosis?
Trance and hypnosis are often confused because hypnosis is a form of trance, but trance is not hypnosis. 'Trance' is a natural state that you drift in and out of many times a day, but hypnosis is a type of trance that is led by a hypnotist.
Hypnosis is an interpersonal trance which means it happens between two people, whereas your day to day trances are intra-personal - which means you go into it yourself.
A couple of short videos to explain in more detail
About Hypnosis
Video explaining the different hypnotic approaches I use to change unwanted thoughts, feelings and behaviours.
Hypnosis Over Counselling
A tongue in cheek metaphor to explain why you might want to try hypnosis to change any unwanted thoughts, feelings and behaviour.
Hypnotic Phenomena
Trance is a narrowing of your focus, and in trance you can experience all sorts of phenomena: dissociation from your surroundings, regression to a younger age, amnesia, flash forwards in time, time distortion, confusion and negative or positive hallucination. All of these are trance states and can often be recreated with hypnosis.
If you are considering hypnotherapy then you are automatically using trance in a way that is unhelpful somewhere in your life.
For example, if you experience performance anxiety:
You narrow your focus in on the possibility of embarrassing yourself.
You flash forwards in time and imagine yourself doing exactly that.
You then feel that embarrassment as if it is actually happening to you now, or perhaps you age regress back to an earlier experience when you were embarrassed and re-experience those feelings now.
In that moment you forget that you are actually very capable and nothing has gone wrong since that incident. While in that trance state you are experiencing the imagined as real.
In this case it is a protection strategy running on automation, but all you are consciously aware of is anxiety.
It is therefore my job, with your help, to either hypnotise you and give you new and more productive automated trance states, or to help you wake up from that narrow focus on the possibility of embarrassment, so that you can prepare for the event with access to all your inner resources regardless of what might have happened in the past.
The above is a simple example using performance anxiety, but what I am saying works for all emotions and habits. Here are a couple more examples:
If you smoke then you narrow your focus on 'the fix', negatively hallucinate the warnings on packaging, forget about the potential fatal consequences while indulging and then run post hypnotic suggestions in the form of excuses and justifications.
If you have anger issues then you narrow your focus on that one thing that your friend said and forget about all the good things they have done for you, just until you've 'woken' from the anger of the emotional trance, after which you probably remember those good things and experience remorse.
Can I Be Hypnotised?
I hope the explanations above help you understand that you experience hypnotic phenomenon regularly. During our first session I will try some hypnotic party tricks with you such as sticking you to the chair or inducing name amnesia. You may or may not respond strongly to these suggestions which are entirely imagination based.
If you do not respond strongly to imagination based suggestions then narrowing your focus onto emotion or memory will usually work.
Even if you do not respond strongly to an external hypnotist, I hope that you understand now that you are ‘hypnotising yourself’ in order to cause the issue that you need help with. That means that I can
use many other methods to ‘un-hypnotise’ you. This involves helping you see through the illusion of your own thinking and feeling process so that you are no longer swept away by it.
You will not get the same approach from every hypnotherapist. Whether you have tried hypnotherapy and other therapies before, or you are only just looking into therapy for the first time, getting in touch with me through any of the ways suggested on this site means you can start a no-obligation conversation with me about how I might be able to help you.